


heaven help the fool who falls in love

by lulla_lunekjaer



Series: else writes soulmate aus [2]
Category: The Ever Afters Series - Shelby Bach
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/M, Kissing, Kissing in the Rain, Not much plot, Phone Calls & Telephones, Rain, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Worldbuilding, like a lot of it, the natural event not the person although I do love Rain dearly
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-02-12
Updated: 2018-02-12
Packaged: 2019-03-12 10:22:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,876
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13545372
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lulla_lunekjaer/pseuds/lulla_lunekjaer
Summary: "Soulmates aren't insta-love.""Maybe I fell in love with you anyway."Some drabbles, expansions, and one-shots from the same universe as "you've been on my mind girl since the flood," a Batty soulmate AU (https://archiveofourown.org/works/13447518/).Not in chronological order





	1. what about that midnight phone call

**Author's Note:**

> work title, again, from "Ophelia" by the Lumineers
> 
> chapter titles will be from other songs and will be noted in their notes

It’s almost midnight when he calls.

“Hey,” she answers, because they both know who they are.

“Hey,” he says, “where are you?” This is their usual greeting, their little ritual.

“In my bedroom,” she says, “looking up at the stars.”

“Same,” he says.

You can’t see the stars from Minneapolis, not without a telescope and a clear night and maybe a blackout, but you can see them bright and clear while lying in a pickup truck just outside a small town in Northern Minnesota. The fourth thing Sherah had done after getting back to her aunt’s house, after taking a shower, getting dressed, and eating, was go out and buy some of those plastic glow in the dark stars and stick them on the ceiling in the guest room. She had so far managed to keep her aunt out of the room when it was dark, and they _should_ be able to be taken off again, but she didn’t want to take her chances before she had to.

So what Sherah meant when she said that she was looking up at the stars was that she was looking up at the ones she had placed meticulously on the ceiling in the same pattern as the ones that were over Ben’s head at that same moment.

Equally, what Ben meant when he said same was that he was lying in the back of his truck on top of a pillow and blanket looking up at the ones that had been there for as long as he could remember, the ones that his dad had pointed out to him when he was very young - “See? There’s Orion, and his belt, which is the three stars close together in a line. Like a belt, you see it?” - and that he had described to Sherah as accurately as he could while she consulted a star chart, the ones that were over her head at that same moment.  

“They’re beautiful tonight, aren’t they?”

He can’t see it, but her eyes narrow.

“Ben, I swear, I am not falling for that again.”

She can hear the laughter in his voice.

“You know who else is beautiful?”

“Ben,” she says warningly.

“You,” he says, probably with that grin of his, the one that made his eyes crinkle and her heart melt, but she doesn’t know for sure. (spoiler alert: Ben is grinning like there’s no tomorrow)

“Get some new lines, you dork,” she says, but that doesn’t change the fact that she felt a little something in her heart, just enough to make it skip a beat, and she thinks, _is this what love is?_

The thing is, with soulmates, you still have to fall in love. It’s usually made easier by the fact that you know you’re meant to be with this person, that the universe has decreed it to be so, but it’s still usually not love at first sight.

According to Dr. Cypris at the Institute for Soulmate Research in Chicago, many participants in a recent study marked that it was love at first sight, but later revised their statements to say that this may have been influenced by the fact that they knew that the other person was their soulmate and that there was a secondary moment where it was confirmed beyond a doubt that this person was their soulmate - this, Dr. Cypris added, was, according to further research, more likely the moment they “fell in love.”

Among those who claim to have fallen in love at first sight is David Apis.

David met his soulmate, Amelia Rivers, when they made eye contact across a crowded room at a party neither of them particularly wanted to be at. He made his way across the room to her, where he proceeded to introduce himself. He is quoted as having said, “Nothing can beat my relief when Amelia said, “I’m Dr. Amelia Rivers, and I’m keeping my last name,” because those were my words - still are, actually - and she knew that what I had just said to her were her words, which is why she said the thing about her last name. And more power to her, because that was the greatest moment of my life. The only one that might be greater is when she kissed me at the altar on our wedding day.”

There are far more stories, however, Dr. Cypris tells me, about soulmates who fell in love later, along the way.

This is one of them.

Lying there and looking up at the stars, Benvolio Taylor and Sherah binti Ajis know that they are soulmates, but they aren’t in love. Not yet.

She tells a joke, something her cousin said that she just now realizes is funnier in Malay. He laughs anyway. He always will.

He says something about Shakespeare, and she mentions how _Taming of the Shrew_ is her favorite, and he talks about when he saw it in Minneapolis with his grandparents, and she talks about reading it in class and being Kate. They decide they’re more an Orlando and Rosalind type couple, although, Ben says, he would never carve on a tree. It damages them.

Sherah’s aunt knocks on the door and tells her to go to sleep. She looks at her watch, and it’s well past 2am. She smiles as she tells him goodnight.

“Or, I suppose, good morning.”

Ben starts humming something that sounds like you could tap dance to it, from the fifties, maybe? Whatever it is, she likes it.

“Good morning,” he sings to her to the same tune, “good morning to you.”

She laughs. “Good night,” she says, and hangs up.

They’re not there yet, but they’re starting to fall in love.


	2. it means that I have loved you from the first

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> they kiss and have emotions and I like to extrapolate on the worldbuilding of soulmate AUs
> 
> occurs somewhere and honestly I have no idea where but it Happens okay

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> since AO3 won't allow chapter notes on first chapters, title of the first chapter from What About Everything by Carbon Lead  
> this title from The Ball from Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812
> 
> context is everything

He wasn’t expecting it. For all that Ben has tried to educate himself on feminism, he still expected himself to be the one to initiate their first kiss.

He would tell the story to their grandchildren, eventually. “It was so poetic, straight out of The Notebook, rain everywhere -”

“I’d prefer to compare it to

the rain scene in Enchanted, or Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” Sherah would interrupt him.

“You’re right, Enchanted is such a good movie,” he would say with a dreamy look on his face. She would grab his shoulder, and he would look up at her, and she would lean down even though her back didn’t work quite as well as it had when they were teenagers, and then she would kiss him, and the grandchildren who were old enough to know what disgust and the status quo were would squirm, and the ones that were young enough to know only love would smile at them.

Sherah had totally expected to be the one to initiate their first kiss.

“He’s such a nerd,” she would tell their grandchildren, “I knew he was never going to kiss me -”

“That’s not true, I had a cool plan!”

“- so I kissed him first. Ben, doing the internet thing with Hershey kisses is not a cool plan.”

“It was cool,” he would whisper to his grandchildren.

Sherah would smile, adjusting her hijab. Her hair will be gray now, and more brittle, but whenever Ben reaches up to tuck a lock of it back under whatever color hijab she’s wearing, he still looks at her like he did the first time, like he knew she was the only thing in the world that mattered to him and didn’t care.

If he had known what she was thinking in that first moment, Ben would say that he did care, and that’s why she mattered so much. Sherah would flush, and bat his hand away from where it was still caressing her face, and he would tug her closer and eventually one of them would remind the other that there was something in the oven, and then one of two things would happen. Either Ben would take whatever it was out of the oven in fifteen minutes and they would enjoy pleasant conversation over the dinner table, or roughly an hour later Sherah would sit bolt upright and say “The oven!” and Ben would remove a smoking mass from their thankfully-unharmed oven and they would cough and throw it out and order pizza. The pizza delivery would be late because it was raining and Ben would have fallen asleep on the couch and Sherah would wrap a flannel shirt around her head while answering the door because it was the first thing she grabbed.

It was raining the night they kissed for the first time, too. They had gone out, on a date, to a place that made milkshakes that put homemade whipped cream on top - thick and sugary, the kind that was almost as good as the milkshake itself.

They were trying to hurry to the bus stop when the skies opened up. They were drenched within minutes. Ben tried to keep his reading glasses dry where they sat in his shirt pocket, but he quickly failed. The rain was dripping down his face in a way that he hoped was anime protagonist but was more teenage boy caught with soulmate in rainstorm. Sherah’s hijab was sticking to her wet hair underneath in the most unpleasant way imaginable. There was even water beginning to pool inside her duck boots.

In short, they were miserable, and at this rate, probably going to miss the bus.

“This really sucks and at this rate, we’re probably going to miss the bus,” Ben said.

That’s when Sherah thought of it.

“Ben,” she said.

“Chatty,” he answered.

“I know a way to make this a lot less miserable,” she said, ignoring the nickname and turning to face him.

“Oh? Are you a mermaid, or something, because that would be cool.” he said.

“Even better,” she said, leaning in and cupping his face with one hand. “Here.”

She kissed him, and it was like everything else melted away. Even if it had actually melted away, and if they had not been kissing, Ben and Sherah were unlikely to actually notice, because as we have mentioned, it was raining. He was just tall enough that she had to bend her head back to get the right angle, and she was just short enough that he had to lean over to continue kissing her. He bit her lip, just slightly, and she opened her mouth. It is at this point we feel the need to note that the metaphor of tongues battling for dominance is, frankly, ridiculous, and whatever Sherah and Ben’s tongues were doing, it was not battling, but rest assured, they were doing something.

It was not the most perfect kiss in the history of kissing. They were teenagers having their first kiss while standing in the rain about forty feet from a bus shelter after having had mint and peanut butter milkshakes, two flavors which do not particularly go together.

But also, they were teenagers having their first kiss, and they were soulmates, and it made them less miserable in the rain, even when they spent about ten minutes standing there kissing when a bus shelter was forty feet away, which made them laugh when they discovered it, and it might not have been perfect, but it was a pretty damn good start. It was a start.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't know how kissing works


End file.
